No inertia with Persia

“The moving finger writes and having writ,/Moves on nor all they piety nor wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a line/Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it” – those lines of Omar Khayyam from not much short of a millennium ago offer one Persian perspective on today’s world events centred on Iran. A salutary contrast to the mad mullah image generally surrounding the Islamic Republic – although most famous for his Rubaiyat poetry, Omar Khayyam was first and foremost a man of science, an astronomer and mathematician (when today happens to be the International Day of Mathematics to mark Albert Einstein’s birthday – and more recently, eight years ago, also the day on which Stephen Hawking finally succumbed to the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis claiming the life of the Sushi Group’s Darío Lopérfido a fortnight ago). As for the lines quoted above, they apply perfectly to the drift of events in the poet’s native land – even if Donald Trump is not exactly famous for either piety (his Christian conservative support notwithstanding) or wit and nor is he especially lachrymose.

Trump might not seem to have much in common with Alexander the Great apart from a shared passion for naming everywhere and everything after themselves – the Egyptian city might be the most famous today but over 70 Alexandrias were founded or renamed following the Macedonian conquest while the drive to rebrand New York’s Penn Station as “Trump Station” is only the latest example in the United States. Were Colin Farrell’s horrendous hairdo in the Alexander film an accurate depiction of the Macedonian conqueror, we might add a penchant for bad hair days with weird colouring but surely not. Yet what both men do have in common is having been crowned Persian monarch. 

Simple enough in Alexander’s case – having conquered the mighty Persian Empire in just four years by 330 BC, he had himself recognised as emperor (or “King of Kings”) and there were even rumours that his early death at the age of 33 was the result of poisoning due to fears that his mass incorporation of Persian youth into his army with Greek military training would displace his Macedonian and Hellenic veterans. Rather more complicated in the case of Trump. When confronted with Stormy Daniels or the Republican’s pathological allergy to the truth, the aforementioned Christian conservatives must find him a hard pill to swallow and tied themselves into knots trying to justify their support until somebody came up with the perfect answer – quote Isaiah 45, 1-4 from The Bible (Trump happens to have been the 45th US president as well as now the 47th). Those verses describe the pagan Persian King Cyrus the Great as “God’s anointed” for shattering the power of Babylon around 550 BC and freeing the chosen people from captivity, thus serving divine purposes – as the reprobate Trump is now assumed to be doing. This Cyrus parallel thus turns Trump into a Persian ruler long before he hit on the idea of taking out Ali Khamenei.

Delving into Persian history and Rubaiyat poetry might be a hard ask when all too many people have problems placing Iran on a map of the world and there is certainly no space here for all the three (or even seven) millennia of Persian history but a few basic facts should be presented. There might be only one letter of difference between Iran and Iraq but this does not justify placing the two countries along with Afghanistan all in one bag as troublesome camel jockeys. Firstly, the 90 million Persians are very self-consciously not Arabs – ethnically, they are Indo-European, not Semitic (which makes them even more alien to Israel, in theory) while their Farsi language is fairly unintelligible for speakers of Arabic, far less overlap than, say, between Russian and Polish. With a civilisation dating back to the middle of the sixth century BC, they also tend to despise other regional powers such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with less than a century of history (founded in 1932).

Nor do they even have the Islamic faith wholly in common with other Middle Eastern countries (with the exception of Israel, of course). Nor does the difference only lie in the Iranians being Shiite as opposed to Sunni Muslims with their doctrinal dispute over Islamic succession (the former historically assigning religious leadership to direct descendants of the  prophet Muhammad instead of whoever happens to be Caliph like the Sunnis, perhaps explaining why Khamenei’s son has so automatically risen to the helm in the face of Operation Epic Fury). Iranians also harbour the curious myth that they are the only Muslim country never to have been conquered by the Arabs, voluntarily embracing their own brand of Islam on their own terms – pure denialism begrudging a loss to what they deemed an inferior race since the history books teach quite clearly that Arab armies brutally overran the Persian empire in the first two decades after Muhammad’s death in 632.

This eccentric ramble has done nothing to tackle the questions raised by the umpteen analyses of the Iranian situation – whether Trump has any idea what he is doing or clear objectives, whether there is any serious interest in transforming a brutal theocracy and whether the likeliest alternative in an ethnically diverse country is chaos, how many countries will be caught up in an escalating conflict, the ethical dilemmas between confronting a nuclear threat and the tragic destruction of war, etc. etc. But given the impossibility of adding anything new to all the analysis of the present in the past fortnight and the even greater impossibility of predicting the future, this history graduate opted for a different approach more anchored in the past, however quirky the result might be.

Last and probably least, today’s anniversary of Einstein’s birth and Hawking’s death was mentioned at the start of this column – today is also the anniversary of two more famous deaths: Juan Manuel de Rosas, the self-styled “tyrant anointed by God” (sounds almost Iranian), in Southampton and Karl Marx in London. President Javier Milei has recently said more than once that Niccolò Machiavelli is dead but today he could also say that Karl Marx is dead.